On 19 April 1999 the parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was convened in the Reichstag (assembly building) in central Berlin as an all-German body for the first time in fifty-eight years during a ceremony to mark the transfer of the capital from the west German city of Bonn. The same occasion also celebrated the conclusion of Sir Norman Foster's dramatic renovation of an edifice which, in 1894, had been inaugurated as the seat for the congress of the first unified German state created in 1870–1, and which had witnessed some of the key moments in the drama of German history during the Wilhelmine period, the First World War, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship. Some eight and a half years after the unification of 3 October 1990, the symbolic return to Berlin, marked in a historic structure which had remained derelict since the nation's defeat in 1945, confirmed for many of those watching that the Berlin Republic had finally come into existence.

Norman Foster's innovative redesign for the Reichstag proclaims the values that are to be associated with the ‘new’ Germany. The glass cupola set upon its nineteenth-century skeleton containing galleries from which the public is able to peer down into the debating chamber thus symbolises a very contemporary commitment to the ideal of democratic transparency.